"I got invited in for coffee this morning after scraping up an acquaintance last week."

It wasn't hard to scrape up an acquaintance.

"Oh," he answered, rather taken by her trim appearance, and feeling as if he might scrape up an acquaintance with her.

We hear the tap, tap of a silver-tipped cane as a convivial ancient follows us around in hope of scraping up an acquaintance.

I had salvaged part of the four days before I could scrape up an acquaintance with him by memorizing everything there was about him in the university library, so I knew what papers he had written, where he had presented them, what earned and honorary degrees he held, and what books he had written.